The Throne of Bones (11 page)

My hands by now were smeared with clotted gore, and when I paused to rest I was horrified to catch myself absently licking them clean. I had never tasted human blood, or the congealed slime that was like Umbra’s blood, and I wondered why it didn’t sicken me. I deliberately licked my hand. Except for the idea of it, I found nothing to dislike.

I turned her over, revealing a huge bruise of pooled blood on her back. I had to stamp on her buttocks and crack some of her bones to compose her more comfortably for sawing the back of her head, but by then I was too weary to go on. In the hope of refreshing myself, I reached for the food I had put by.

I wish I could make my thoughts and feelings at that time clear, but they weren’t clear then, nor are they now. I had seen the great love of my life—yes, she was—polluted by the foulest of fiends, I had been beaten senseless, I had murdered her that morning, I had heard and guessed more than enough about my heritage to drive anyone mad, and now I was violating her body in accord with a superstition I would have laughed at yesterday: it would be inadequate to say I was
overwrought.

I may have been asleep for a moment without knowing it, because the final horror began just like a dream: I was eating something that I assumed I had brought with me, but I couldn’t remember bringing anything, nor could I say what I was eating. Instead of looking in my hand, as any sane, waking man would have, I pondered the question while continuing to chew and swallow.

I put the food aside and resumed sawing, stopping every now and then for another bite. Only when I had sawed off the top of Umbra’s skull did I know in a dim way that I had devoured her heart. I began to scoop out gobbets of her brain and eat them, too.

I had no idea why I was wearing my husband’s clothes. The sleeves were too long, they got in the way of ... what I was doing.

It couldn’t be his stupid joke, as I thought when I came to myself and noticed the clothes, because I was the one doing it: I was the one eating this unknown woman’s corpse. The mere fact didn’t repel me. I had wanted to join Exudimord in his feasts. I had wanted to share his pleasures. But the things he offered me always stank and crawled with maggots, and my weak, human stomach would rebel. Not even his promise that I would become a ghoul if I acted like one had given me the strength to overcome my despised nature.

Why had he never given me fresh meat like this? It was delicious! He must have been testing me.

And I knew he must have arranged this treat. Had I passed his tests at last? “Exudimord?” I called. Sleithreethra! Just saying his name made me squirm inside, made me moist and ready for him.

He wasn’t here. No one was, just me and the corpse, inside a little box I identified from murals celebrating their fatuousness as the tomb of the Glyphts.
Lord
Glyphtard! I had to laugh. If the lowest of Vendrens pissed on the highest of Glyphts, the stream would disperse to a golden dew before it fell far enough to touch him, and he would think he had been kissed by the fairies.

Living near the cemetery, collecting those amusing relics, he had duped me into believing him something more than human, but he was only a cheap tradesman, posing as a nobleman and playing at ghoul. I tore off his hateful clothes.

The clothes were his best, Fand-green silk and lace, that he might wear to a ball, but—I pulled off the hat and confirmed my suspicion, that it was one of those black things with a flat crown you wore to funerals. His mother? I spat out my mouthful. No, it wasn’t she: I couldn’t be absolutely sure, since the body had been ripped and disjointed and spread in a circle around me, but I believed this had been a much younger woman. At length I found confirmation of this, not one of the crone’s calloused hoofs, but an intact foot almost as pretty as my own.

However hard it was not to, I shouldn’t hate Glyphtard’s mother. The bitch had unwittingly made my wildest dreams come true. Spying on me, as always, she had seen me coming home from the cemetery one morning and had implored me not to go near the oldest section at night, and especially nowhere near the tomb of the ancient pornographer, Chalcedor. A particularly vile ghoul, devoted to that writer’s lubricities in his human life and now consumed by an itch for young women that he could seldom satisfy with living ones, was reputed to lurk beneath the tomb. One day, perhaps, I would tell her how right she’d been, and thank her.

The mystery of the corpse seemed impenetrable. The only young women in the household were slaves, but not even a Glypht would lay a slave in his family tomb, however much he might have doted on her; nor could I alone have eaten so much of her body. I called my lover again. He
must
be here! I tried to look inside the coffins, the only places Exudimord could be hiding, but their lids were too heavy to move.

How did I get here? My last memories made me cringe. I saw Glyphtard’s leather coat coming at me like a falling wall. He had beaten me, but now there were no bruises nor even tender spots on my face or body.

I considered the obvious possibility, that I was dreaming. Whenever that thought crossed my mind in a dream, I would wake up, but now I didn’t. Besides, I never dreamed such convincingly banal details as the chafing of my heels when I walked in my husband’s boots, the annoyance of a shred of meat caught in my back teeth, the fluttery sound of the lamp as its oil ran low. Unlike the illegible symbols that puzzled me in dreams, the inscriptions on the sarcophagi made sense.

Other possibilities ... but I hadn’t the courage even to name them. The walls of the tomb drew closer, there was no air! I ran to the door, expecting the worst, but it opened. The night brushed my face with a feather of fine rain. Dripping eaves plashed and pattered. The breeze chilled me, but I could bear to stay in the tomb no longer with my unanswered questions.

I wobbled back in Glyphtard’s boots to get his cloak. When I took it down, I screamed to find two Glyphts, uglier even than most of them, piercing me with bright eyes. My heart almost stopped before I saw that they were only sculpted heads of the dogs that had whelped the old bitch. That was an apt metaphor: Glyphtard’s grandfather looked as if he should have been kept outside on a chain. And yet I found something in his brutal face that stirred me, a familiarity that was pleasant, but at the same time so disturbing that I turned away and blotted his features from my mind.

I went out in the dark street and called for my lover. How I wanted him! He had stirred me as no mere man ever had, he had woken me fully from a sleep that my husband had only been able to fret and ruffle, like a restless bedmate, and I always yearned for him, but now my want was close to madness. I screamed for him. I began running down the narrow street, although I had no idea where it would lead me.

I collided with what seemed a fixed obstacle, but it pinned me with thick arms.

“What’s this?” the watchman demanded.

“Unwrap it and see,” a second one laughed.

“Let me go! I am the chosen one of Exudimord Noxis, King of Ghouls!” I screamed.

“And I’m the Spring Queen, you addled baggage.” He smelled bad enough from sour wine and sweat, but when he undid his coarse breeches, the stink of his unwashed privates gagged me. “Come dance around my pole.”

“Oh, look at this!” the second watchman breathed with a lecher’s reverence when he had torn away my cloak. He patted my buttocks, then hooked me unspeakably with a cruel finger. “We must have won the favor of Filloweela, Gorpho. How did we do it, do you suppose?”

“Don’t question the gods,” the first one said, blindly pushing his hard cock against my belly, “just take their gifts.”

“Then take this one from Oreema!” I spat in his face as I thrust my knee up between his legs. Tender flesh jammed against unyielding bone. He bellowed and doubled over, releasing me, and I turned to run, but the second one hit me hard enough to make light explode before my eyes with the handle of his bill. I fell to my knees, and I had no strength to resist when he kicked me all the way down and rolled me over. He lay between my legs, and they were useless against him now, but I tried to claw his eyes. When he proved that he could hold both my wrists with one huge hand, I knew the fight was over even before his hurtful probe gouged into me.

The first one kicked him as he lay grunting and thrusting. “She’s mine!” he bellowed. “She ran into my arms, didn’t she?”

“You let her go, stupid. She’d be gone if I wasn’t here. Use her mouth.”

“That’s what your father should have done with your whore of an Ignudo mother,” Gorpho grumbled, but he dropped to his knees by my head.

“I’ll bite you!” I cried. “If you do, I swear, I’ll bite it off!”

“Yes, and I may have a sore prick for a week, but you’ll be blind for life, bitch,” he growled, and when he pressed his thumbs on my eyes I believed him. I opened my mouth to his foul-smelling penis.

I thought they might let me go after sating their desire of the moment, but their male itch to outdo each other burned in them more hotly even than honest lust. No more to them than a ball hurled back and forth in their disgusting contest, I was beaten and used for what seemed like all time.

They granted me a longer respite than usual. I tried to stop sobbing with shame and pain so I could hear their whispers.

“ ... cut her throat.”

“ ... Vendren tattoos.”

“Even if she is crazy, we can’t let her live to tell.”

“No!” I shrieked, trying to run. “Exudimord! Help me!”

My scream choked on blood as the first hook bit into my neck. The second caught me in those parts they had so cruelly used. I had thought I could feel no more pain there, but I was very wrong.

My last thought was an absurd one: that I had suffered these wounds, or ones very like them, before.

I, who have told my tale as Glyphtard Fand, have told you those things as Umbra. I saw them with her eyes, felt them with her body and knew them with her mind, even her second death.

When I woke, male that I was, I instantly clutched my male parts to make sure they hadn’t been invaginated like a glove. To a touch made clumsy by my distracted state, those parts seemed not merely present but transformed to outrageous proportions, even though I still shivered and retched with loathing at the imprinted memory of phallic thrusts. I felt no pain from the wounds I—she—had suffered, but I remembered them, too. It seemed unlikely I would ever forget them.

How could such things be? A ghoul, not a man, adopts the identity of the corpse whose brain and heart it eats, or so the stories said, and I was a man. Then why had I eaten her? Perhaps I was the victim of a last prayer or curse mouthed by my wife to her foul Goddess.

The scum who had raped me in Umbra’s guise had stolen my cloak and my boots and thrown me down a stairway to the sunken entrance of a tomb, there to be rained on all night. I was cold and wet, but the worst discomfort, oddly enough, came from the wan light of the damp day. It was like gritty dust on my eyeballs, and I squinted to the verge of blindness as I mounted to the street. Consequently, before I knew what I was doing, I blundered among mourners in solemn procession.

Now it’s true that we provincials have a much less casual attitude about nudity than Frothirans, for instance, but the appearance of a naked man hardly called for such an ear-splitting chorus of horror and outrage.

“Good people, forgive me, I was robbed and beaten—I had no thought to desecrate your obsequies—”

Incomprehensibly, my mild words stirred only more anger and fear. “Keep it from Mother Ashtrella’s coffin!” a voice shrieked beside me, and that cry was taken up by dozens of screamers. I took my hand from my eyes—more screams, as if I conducted a choir of lunatics—and saw the white gowns of Ashtareeta’s clergy flapping and fluttering about me like pigeons harried by a dog.

“Good ladies—” I began, but a brick bounced off my skull, and I roared with fury. The cry drove them mad. The mob tried to escape the clogged street, but it could do so only over the bodies of its members. I watched in amazement as the holy women trampled their fallen sisters. The coffin fell. One woman flung her body over it to protect the corpse, whom she presently joined in death.

Obviously, the religious hysteria that Umbra started had only lain dormant, waiting for a jolt to revive it. Their terror-stricken, backward glances told me that they didn’t see me as a man at all, but as some demon of their fantasies, newly risen from the underground. I played the role in which they cast me by fleering and gibbering, and I laughed like a true demon when that perfected their panic.

Armed watchmen were fighting their way toward me. I grimaced and shook my fists, laughing at the way they struck aside the women they rushed to defend. I tripped across the street on the heads of packed mourners, like one crossing a brook from stone to stone, and leaped from the last shrieking skull to the roof of a tomb.

I had no idea how I made such a leap, or what possessed me to know I could. I was an athlete, a fairly good one, and the tombs were not so tall as houses, but it was impossible that I should have done that with the ease of a cat springing onto a table. More flung bricks and slates distracted me. I leaped to another roof and dropped into the next street of the necropolis.

Given a moment, I raised a hand to my bruised head; and screamed at the sight of that hand. It was twice as broad as it should have been, and the fingers sprouted claws. My new, misshapen body was suited to the hand. Leaning against the wall of a tomb, I felt that my back was ridged and bristly as a hog’s. My screams of horror became horrifying laughs.

However ugly, my feet were fast and sure, and I used their skill when the watchmen boiled out of an alley just then. I began to revel in my new agility. I danced away from the catching hooks and thrusting points of their bills as Umbra hadn’t been able to, taunting them, playing out the game from street to street and rooftop to rooftop, jibing or farting at them whenever they seemed in danger of losing me.

If only the light didn’t vex me so! I had to get home. I would lose them; they wouldn’t have recognized me as Lord Glyphtard. I could hide in the stable and enjoy all that food I had prudently stored while deluding myself that I was assembling a scientific collection. Mother would help me hide. Mother.... She had known, when she warned my wife to beware of Chalcedor’s tomb, that Umbra saw “keep out” signs as warm welcomes. She had known, when she told me that fairy tale about her father’s death, that he was alive and well beneath the tomb. A cynic would say that Mother, for any number of unsavory reasons, had played procuress to her father with my wife; and few ghouls are not cynics. I needed to have a talk with her.